1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the field of accessing and processing digital video on a network such as the Internet. More particularly, the invention relates to providing media content owners the capability to deliver media content to end users as an interactive experience.
2. Description of the Related Technology
A number of techniques have evolved in recent years as the Internet has grown in size and sophistication, including:
The use of web servers and HTML delivery to web browsers.
The use of the application-server model for connecting database information with web pages and interactive interfaces for end users.
The use of dynamically generated HTML that pulls information from a database to dynamically format HTML for delivery to the end user.
The use of a template language to merge database output with pre-formatted HTML presentations.
The use of ‘cookies’ to track individual user preferences as they interact with the web pages and applications.
These and other related web technologies and techniques are in commonplace use and readily accessible on the Internet.
In addition to the technologies described above, video indexing technology has also emerged, herein referred to as ‘video logging’. Video logging is a process that incorporates both automated indexing and manual annotation facilities to create a rich, fine-grained (in a temporal sense) index into a body of video content. The index typically consists of a combination of visual and textual indices that permit time-based searching of video content. The index may incorporate spoken text, speaker identifications, facial identifications, on-screen text, and additional annotations, keywords, and descriptions that may be applied by a human user executing the video logging application. The Virage VideoLogger is one example of this type of video logging technology that is commercially available.
The delivery of streaming media on the Internet requires the encoding of video content into one or more streaming video formats and efficient delivery of that content to the end users. Common streaming formats presently in use include RealVideo, Microsoft Windows Media, QuickTime, and MPEG. The video logging technology may coordinate the encoding of one or more of these formats while the video is being indexed to ensure that the video index is time-synchronized with the encoded content. The final delivery of media content to an end user is typically accomplished with a wide variety of video serving mechanisms and infrastructure. These mechanisms may include basic video servers (such as those from Real, Microsoft, and Apple), caching appliances (such as those from CacheFlow, Network Appliance, Inktomi, and Cicso), and content delivery networks (herein “CDN's”, such as those from Akamai, Digital Island, iBeam, and Adero). These types of video serving mechanisms deliver media content to the end user.
Media content owners often wish to offer their content on the Internet for a variety of purposes, including commerce, community building, and to generate revenue through advertising and syndication mechanisms. The delivery of interactive, searchable, and personalized video content (for example video, Flash™, Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language or SMIL, and similar formats, herein collectively referred to as ‘video’) on the Internet is a difficult task to accomplish for a majority of content owners. It would require significant time and monetary investments in technical infrastructure as well as the expertise of Information Technology (“IT”) professionals within the content owner's organization to achieve the desired business goals.
Among the important business criteria for success in this area is that the content owner retains total control over their content. It is beneficial for the content owners to have control over the presentation, delivery, access controls, and editorial-indexing aspects of their content at all times. Therefore, what is needed in the technology is a system whereby a service provider can offer a hosted application and associated services for encoding and indexing video media that achieves the content owner's business goals without requiring the existence of technical infrastructure and expertise within the content owner's own organization.